I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

May 11, 2013

"The Call" Tries to Say Too Much

Performers who’ve made their name in musicals often jump at
the chance to show that they can do straight dramatic roles as well. In just the past year, Norbert Leo Butz and
Nathan Lane have shown how nimble they can be with superb performances in How I
Learned to Drive and The Nance. The latest to make that move is Kerry Butler, perhaps
best known as the roller-blading muse in Xanadu but now starring in The Call, a
new drama about interracial adoption that is playing in a joint production by Playwrights Horizons and Primary Stages through May 26.

The Call tells the story of Annie and Peter, a white couple,
who, after many failed attempts to conceive a child, decide to adopt a baby
from Africa. Their best friends, an African-American lesbian couple, are equal
parts supportive (they want their friends to be happy) and skeptical (they
wonder how Annie will deal with a black child’s hair).

The plot, as they say, thickens when the adoption agency makes the titular call to say that it has found a child but she is slightly different from
what Annie and Peter had expected. Will they still take her? Will the experience redefine their feelings
about parenthood and even about one another?

But Barfield trips herself up by layering on
so many other issues— homosexuality, AIDS, poverty in Africa, relationships
between blacks and whites in this country—that the central questions almost get
lost.

Indeed, even Barfield has trouble
keeping up with all of it: the gay
couple actually gets married twice but for no apparent reason. And an
emotional speech by Annie and Peter’s African neighbor, nicely played by Russell G. Jones, goes on so long that
I think I might have dozed off.

What keeps the show on track (and kept me awake) are the
performances, particularly Butler’s. The actress is also the mother of two
young daughters adopted from Africa (click here to read about that) and she conveys
Annie’s hunger to be a mother with heartbreaking clarity.

Kelly AuCoin is equally affecting as Peter. Meanwhile, Crystal A.
Dickinson provides comic relief as the more outspoken of the two black friends. And, in the play's least flashy role, Eisa Davis is quite good, too,
although she and Dickinson display none of the chemistry you'd expect from newlyweds.

Still, the maternal relationship is the primal one here. And despite whatever reservations I may have, Barfield gets points for at least trying to connect the personal preoccupations of upper middle-class folks that dominate so many contemporary plays with the political concerns of the rest of the world, which appear in far too few of them.